A method and an apparatus of the type cited at the beginning are disclosed by published U.S. Patent Application No. 20020038752. In this case, products are picked up from the preceding process by a gripper conveyor and moved along a circular endless movement path. Underneath the gripper conveyor there is a belt conveyor, on which the products are deposited at least partly overlapping one another, that is to say in an overlapping formation. For this purpose, the grippers of the gripper conveyor are constructed in such a way that they can be driven individually to open and close, in order to release the products at a predefined location for transfer to the belt conveyor. Since the orientation of the grippers and therefore of the gripped product relative, to the movement path is not changed before the transfer, and the gripper moves along a sharply curved movement path, the non-gripped edge of the product moves at a considerably higher path speed than the gripped edge or the gripper itself. Furthermore, the product has a relatively high speed component in the vertical direction, that is to say in the direction of the conveyor belt. Therefore, when being deposited on the conveyor belt, the non-gripped edge is subjected to correspondingly high braking forces. As a result, the controlled deposition of a product and its careful handling are made more difficult.
In order to reduce this problem somewhat, it is known to design the actual transfer region so that it is not curved, instead to transfer the products in a transfer region running parallel to the belt conveyor. In this case, the conveying device is configured in such a way that the grippers in the transfer region are moved along a movement path running parallel to the belt conveyor. The gripper only opens in this rectilinear portion in order to deposit a product. The quality of the overlapping stream can be improved in this way. However, it is disadvantageous that the conveying device must have a certain minimum extent in the conveying direction of the belt conveyor and therefore cannot be implemented in a space-saving manner.